Category Archives: educational content

SUMs = the eFramework?

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Over the last year or so as the vision of the international eFramework as started to take shape I’ve been hearing more and more about SUMs (service usage models). I went along to the SUMs workshop to see if I could find out exactly what a SUM is.

The event was run by the international eFramework so we had the benefit of having Dan Rehak (consultant to the eFramework), Phil Nichols (one of the eFramework editors) and Lyle Winton (of DEST who has been involved in creating SUMs) facilitating the workshop. This was particularly useful (for me anyway) as it helped to distinguish the aims of the international eFramework from those of the partners involved. The partners in the international eFramework have common goals of interoperability and the use of service orientated approaches, but each country has their own priorities and interpretations of the framework. The eFramework does not mandate any one approach, it should be seen as a reference point for developers where proven technical interoperable scenarios are documented using a set of standard (hotly debated – for example ‘reference model’ has been blacklisted) terms. (Copies of Dan and Lyle’s presentations are available from the e-Framework website)

Although the aim of the day was to actually create some SUMs, we started with an overview from Dan Rehak on the eFramework and SUMs. Services provide the technical infrastructure to make things work – they describe interfaces between applications. A SUM is the description of the combination of services, which meet a specific requirement (or business need). So in some respects a SUM is analogous to a blueprint as it (should) describe the overall ‘business story’ (i.e. what it is supposed to do), with a technical description of the process(es) involved e.g. the services used, the bindings for service expressions and then examples of service implementations. Ideally a SUM should be developed by a community (e.g. JISC or a subset of JISC funded projects working in a specific domain area). That way it is hoped the best of top down (in terms of describing high level business need) and bottom up (in terms of having real instances of deployment) can be combined. I can see a role for JISC CETIS SIGs in helping to coordinate our communities in the development of SUMs.

At this point no official modelling language has been adopted for the description of SUMs. To an extent this will probably evolve naturally as communities begin to develop SUMs and submit them to the framework. Once a SUM has been developed it can be proposed to the eFramework SUM registry and hopefully it will be picked up, reused and/or extended by the wider eFramework community.

Some key points came out of a general discussion after Dan’s presentation:
*SUMs can be general or specific – but have to be one or the other.
*SUMs can be described in terms of other SUMs (particularly in the cases of established services such as open id and shibboleth).
*SUMs can be made up of overlapping or existing SUMs
*Hopefully some core SUMS will emerge which will describe widespread common reusable behaviours.

So what are the considerations for creating a SUM? Well there are three key areas – the description, the functionality and the structure. The description should provide a non-technical, narrative or executive summary of what the SUM does, what problem it solves and its intended function. The functionality should outline the individual functions provided within the SUM – but with no implementation details. The structure should give the technical view of the SUM as a whole, illustrate how the functions are integrated e.g. services, data sources, coordination of services. It can also have a diagrammatic illustration of any coordination. There are a number of SUMs available from the eFramework website as well as more detailed information on actually developing SUMs.

The main part of the workshop was devoted to group working where we actually tried to develop a SUM from a provided scenario. Unsurprisingly each group came up with very different pseudo SUMs. As we worked through the process the need for really clear and concise descriptions and clear boundaries on the number of services you really need became glaringly obvious. Also, although this type of business process may be of use for certain parts of our community, I’m not sure if it would be of use for all. It was agreed that there is a need for best practice guides to help contextualise the development and use of SUMs for different domains/communities. However that is a bit of a chicken and egg situation at the moment.

One very salient point was made by Howard Noble (University of Oxford) when he pointed out that maybe what we should be documenting are ‘anti-sums’ i.e. the things that we do now and the reasons why we take non soa approaches in certain circumstances. Hopefully as each community within the eFramework starts to build SUMs the potential benefits of collecting, documenting and sharing ways for people, systems and services to interoperate will outweigh other approaches. But what is needed most of all (imho) are more real SUMs so that that developers can really start to see the usefulness of the eFramework SUMs approach.

Free tools to create online games and animations – no coding required

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Despite the recent shennanigans surround the BBC Jam project, the corporation continues to be a key player in interactive web developments – even if it just as a conduit for providing information. Yesterday (15th May) the BBC website posted a story about SCRATCH a free set of tools which allows anyone to “create their own animated stories, video games and interactive artworks” without having to create any code. Developed by the MIT Media Lab, the site is primarily aimed at children, but that’s no reason for grown ups not to use it; particularly in an educational setting. One of the downsides of being featured on the BBC site is that the SCRATCH website has been inundated with traffic and so isn’t working to capacity (I still haven’t been able to access it). However, the blogsphere is full of the story and there are a number of videos on YouTube about it. Looking at these it certainly does look like a fairly intutive system. Tony Hirst has an interesting article on it too on his blog .

JISC web2.0 online conference – presenations & discussions available online

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All this week Tom Franklin and Mark Van Harleem are hosting an online conference on web2.0 and its potential impact on the education sector. Although places have been limited for the synchronous presentations, copies of the presentations are available on a moodle site, and anyone can participate in the discussion forums there ( you obviously have to register first to get access to the forums). So far the issues discussed have covered institutional issues, content creation and sharing and pedgagogy. Overall the live session are working well, with just the occassional gremlin. You can log-in and join the discussion @ http://moodle.cs.man.ac.uk/web2/course/view.php?id=3.

Joint Pedagogy Forum and EC SIG meeting, 26 April

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Liverpool Hope University hosted the joint meeting of the Pedagogy Forum and EC SIG last Thursday. The meeting focused on design for learning, with presentations from a number of the projects involved in the current JISC Design for Learning Programme.

The team from Liverpool Hope started the meeting with an overview of their experiences of using IMS Learning Design with teachers and students. Mark Barrett- Baxendale, Paul Hazelwood and Amanda Oddie explained the work they are doing in the LD4P (learning design for practitioners) project where they are working on making a more user-friendly interface for the RELOAD LD editor, the DesignShare project (part of the current JISC tools and demonstrators projects) where they are linking a learning design repository into reload, and the the D4LD (developing for learning design) where they are working on improving the presentation of the OU learning design player. The team are working with practitioners in both HE and FE (and are running a number of courses with students) and so far, have received positive feedback about using learning design. The screenshots they showed of the interface they are working on for RELOAD certainly looked much more user friendly and intuitive. The team are also looking at the role of web2.0 in the DesignShare project as it will link RELOAD and the Opendoc repository using widget like technology.

Professor Diana Laurillard then gave us an overview of the the London Pedagogic Planner tool. This system, although still very much in prototype, has been designed to help scaffold the planning process for staff. Taking a process driven approach, the system prompts the user to input all the factors relating to a course/session/lesson design i.e. room availability, number of teaching hours, number of student hours outside the classroom available. It is hoped that this scaffolded approach to planning can help to exploit the pedagogic value of learning technology as it allows the user to ensure that their designs (whatever their pedagogical approach and what technology they exploit) are workable within the instutional constraints they have to sit in. An important focus of the tool is to put control back into the hands of teachers and so in turn help the wider teaching community come to more informed decisions about how to integrate learning technology into their own practice.

After lunch we were joined remoted by James Dalziel – thanks to James for staying up very late due to the audio gremlins having lots of fun in the morning :-) . James gave us an overview of LAMSv2 and some of his thoughts on the need and potential for pedagogic planners. LAMS v2 is based on a new modular architecture which the team hope will stand them in good stead for the foreseeable future. Whilst retaining the core concepts of the original system, this version introduces a number of new and improved features including: improved support for branching; live editing of sequences – no more runtime lock-in and the ability to export sequences as IMS LD Level A. (There’s no support for importing IMS designs as yet, but it’s something on the team’s to do list.) One other interesting feature is the inclusion of a portfolio export. Basically this feature allows a student to keep a record of all their activities. The system creates and exports a zip file which contains html copies of activies. Through work with the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the v2 can now provide joint classes using the Shibboleth federation system. In terms of pedagogic planners, James outlined his thoughts on current needs. He believes that we need lots of different versions of planners and more research on the the decision making process for designers and teachers. This is obviously an area of increasing focus, but hopefully the two JISC planners are making a good start in this area and it’s something that will be discussed at the LAMS UK conference in July.

Marion Manton and David Balch then gave us an overview of the Phoebe planner tool they have been developing at the University of Oxford. In contrast to the London planner tool, Phoebe has taken a wiki based approach with more emphasis being given to providing advice and support on potential pedagogic approaches. Though there is no reason why the two system couldn’t be used together and that is something that both projects are exploring. As with the London planner, Phoebe is now entering phase 2 and is looking at ways to improve the interface for users. David and Marion outlined the approaches they have been considering, which hopefully will provide looser connections between the content in the wiki and the notes that user create when they are using the system. They are hoping to take a more drag and drop, web 2.0 approach so that users can feel more in control of the system.

Dai Griffiths from the University of Bolton rounded up the day by giving an overview of his impressions of the learning design space. Dai has been involved in many projects relating to IMS Learning Design – notably the UNFOLD project. Dai began by questioning if IMS is agile enough to take advantage of the web 2 world. Increasingly specifications such as content packaging and learning design seem to be at odds with developments in social software. He then went on to highlight some of the confusions that exist around the purpose of IMS Learning Design. Being both a modeling language and an interoperability system there is still confusion about the purpose of the specification. Often projects only focus on one area and forget about the other. There is still a need for interoperability, but perhaps now we need to move to thinking about looser couplings between content, activities and infrastructure and not try to do everything by following one complex specification. IMS LD as it currently stands deals with formal education systems but what about informal learning, can it play a role there too? This is something the TenCompetence project is investigating and they are hoping to have a number of extension to RELOAD launched later this year which start to address that space. Dai closed by re-itterating the need for community engagement and sustaining and building of contacts within the learning design space which is one of the aims of the support wiki for the Design for Learning programme.

Thanks to everyone who presented and attended the meeting for making it such a worthwhile meeting. Also a big thank you to everyone at Liverpool Hope for being such generous hosts and having the patience to work through all our technological gremlins. Copies of all the presentations from the day are available @ http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/April_2007_Meeting.

BBC Jam suspended

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about BBC Jam after they presented at the Intrallect Future Visions Conference. Today the BBC Trust have announced they are suspending the service from 20th March after after complaints from commercial companies received by the European Commission. It’s always been controversial project, with many commercial vendors complaining about the amount of funding being put into the project and the impact it may have on their business.

I know that this doesn’t really have direct relevance to us in the HE sector, however I do think there are similarities between the BBC and British universities. Neither were set up as commercial companies, but increasingly they are having to adapt their structures to become more and more commercially viable. They are both affected by changes in technology – particularly the web.

Call me old fashioned, but I do believe in the Reithian values of BBC to educate, inform and entertain and I’ve never minded paying my licence fee as I do believe the BBC give incredible value for money. There have been some arguments that the BBC’s online development is pushing out new start ups – which I’m not sure I totally agree as I think, that mostly the BBC webpresence has helped to set standards for web design and usability. I just hope that now considerable work has been done in producing resources (not all done in-house either) that the suspension is temporary and people will be able to access the content again soon.

Impact of Open Source Software on Education series launch

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Earlier this week (12 March) Penn State announced the launch of a new series of biweekly postings on the impact of open source software on education on their Terra Incognita blog. Although the series is based around open source software, other related topics including open educational resources and open courseware will be discussed too, and all contributions/discussions will be made freely available:

” our intent to not only provide a rich resource on the theme of this series, but to also contribute to the larger movement of free content by making the resources that we create widely and freely available. In an effort to do so, a few days after each posting, the articles, discussion, and a brief summary will be reformatted and made available on WikiEducator as Open Educational Resources. It is our hope that these resources will take a life of their own as they are reused, modified, and returned to the community.”

The first article is from Ruth Sabeen (UCLA) about their evaluation process which resulted in them choosing Moodle. More information about the series including the schedudule is available @

http://www.wikieducator.org/Open_Source_Software_in_Education_Series_on_Terra_Incognita

A couple of future contributions which caught my eye include Wayne Mackintosh on Bridging the educational divide with free content and free software (7 April) and James Dalziel on pedagogy, technology and open source -experiences from LAMS (16 May).

Maybe this kind of approach would be useful for JISC/DEST to help with the development of the eFramework initiative.

JORUM pipes

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Following on from Neil’s post about pipes, there’s been a bit of discussion about the potential of pipes in teaching and learning in the EC SIG discussion list. David Davies (Warwick University) has pointed to a couple of pipes which are linked to JORUM

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/bItJQC7D2xGvFoY000qv4w – this pipe searches a sub-set of JORUM.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/_nxRZz7D2xGGvKQPqGIyXQ – this pipe searches aggregated JORUM & Intute feeds.

I guess the downside of these are you need to be logged in to preview and download resources. But it shows that the technology has potential for educational applications.

Future Visions (thoughts on the Intrallect Seminar)

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Last Friday I attended the Intrallect Future Visions Seminar in Edinburgh. The brief for the four speakers was to look no further than three years forward, anticipate advances in technology but focus on the the benefits that people involved in in education will see as a result of these advances. The meeting venue had the advantage of having an interactive voting system, which meant there was a good level of interactivity for the audience during the presentations.

Martin Morrey of Intrallect kicked the day off with a look a the repositories space. He began by reflecting on some of the common assumptions of the 90’s. Remember when we all believed that the future lay in intelligent tutoring systems with structured, well catalogued, adaptive content . . . Well as we all know the reality hasn’t quite been like that. Systems aren’t really that intelligent, and we’re still struggling with the issues (both technical and pedagogical) of creating adaptable, reuseable content. The rise of google and social tagging have also challenged our assumptions about metadata use and creation. So what is the short term future for repositories? Well, Martin put forward the case that in the next three years repositories will be much more configurable. He envisioned single systems supporting a range of object types. Services will be in place for identifier registration, there will be a range of vocabulary application profiles, license registries and common authorisation and authentication services. Content will be able to be easily be reached and consumed by a range of learning systems which will be able to give users a variety of views of content.

Next we had Anne Eastgate, Director of the BBC Jam project. Anne gave an overview of this £150 million (yes, that’s right 150 million) 5 year project (2003-2008) development project which is producing freely available content for 5-16 year olds in the UK. Many of you will be aware of the controversy this project created when it was first put forward, with many commercial companies worried that this project would give the BBC an unfair advantage in the sector. To allay some of these fears, the project has been limited to producing material for 50% of the curriculum, but is still facing major hurdles from both the EU and the UK government in getting all the content it is producing online.

Although the content is freely available via the BBC Jam website, it has been restricted to a UK only service. The material has been produced using SCORM 2004 so it can be used in learning environments;. However reuse of the content is restricted to the target age range, so although much of the content maybe of use the the FE and ACL sectors, they wouldn’t be able to get a licence to run the materials in their VLEs. The BBC is currently negotiating licence arrangements with local education authorities for school use. The licence arrangements are primarily to ensure that the content is used with the appropriate age range of learners there are no additional charges for the content.

Despite the political problems faced by the project, content has been developed and is available now. All the content has been developed taking a learner centred approach and from the demo we were shown it is really engaging and interactive.

Colin Milligan, of the University of Strathclyde (currently project manager for CDLOR project) then looked at issues of identity and personalisation. Currently there is no one definition of personalised learning, however most people would agree that it is learner centred, flexible and customisable. The changing landscape of the education sector with growing numbers of part-tme students and the increase in informal learning has lead to the recognition of a need for new ways of measuring achievement. These changes go hand in hand with the developments in the online world and how people are adapting to those changes. For the first time we are faced with students who are coming to University with access to richer technology in their homes (or in their pockets) than are provided by many institutions – who needs a university email account anymore?

Colin took us on a whirlwind tour of the Web 2.0 landscape, outlining the potential that webservices can have for education by allowing more learner control over access and organisation content, as well as more flexible and appropriate collaborative tools for content creation and sharing eg. netvibes, flickr and zoho.

Changing the system is obviously not going to happen overnight, but with more students coming into higher education who have been working with say a portfolio system in schools maybe one driver for change which institutions will not be able to ignore.

The last presentation of the day came from Chris Pegler of the OU who looked at new learning activities and what will we want next? Chris took the opportunity to remind us of the challenges that we are still facing in e-learning. Although the potential is there for lots of positive additions to the learning landscape we are still being held back by other factors, technical and more importantly social. I particularly liked her question ‘is it rude not to look at someone when they are talking to you?’ – unsurprisingly the audience very much agreed with this statement, But when we start to think of this in a learning situation does this still apply? Should students always been looking at a lecturer? Is ‘continuous partial distraction’ acceptable? How many meetings do we all go to and sit and check our emails? Why should we expect students to be any different?

Using the kit in our pocket can also lead to its own set of challenges such as finding common programmes which everyone has – the lowest common demoninator, but these might not necessarily be the most appropriate for the learning activity.

Are we in danger of creating a new digital divide between the students who have 24/7 online, broadband access and those who don’t? Traditionally online success has been measured by the quantity of messages posted – is this really relevant? Increasing our students are working on a just in time basis so don’t have time to read/post lots of messages. Should we looking to synchronous activities more? This is something Chris is doing in her teaching. Web 2.0 technologies give a huge amount of choice, but do students want (or indeed need) that level of choice?

All of the presentations were engaging, raised lots of questions, though of course not all of the answers.
I felt it was a really good, stimulating day – well done to everyone at Intrallect for organising it.
Presentations from the day are available from the Intrallect website.

Is content packaging just metadata?

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According to Andy Powell (Eduserve), yes, it is. And at a technical workshop on content packaging for complex objects organised by the Repositories Research Team last week, he put forward a case for the potential of the Dublin Core Abstract Model to be used for packaging complex objects. ( A quick overview of his thinking is available from the eduserve blog). Along side the DCAM, presentations were given on MPEG21 DIDL, METS, IEEE RAMLET, IMS Content Packaging.

The objectives of the day were to reach a better understanding of the use of some content packaging standards and models to describe complex objects and to compare and evaluate the appropriateness of each in the context of digital repositories.

So what were the outcomes – were there any clear winners or losers? Is content packaging really just metadata? For me, I’d have to say. . . maybe. The elegance of the DC solution is perhaps, at this point in time, just a bit removed from some of the realities of certain packaging scenarios – particularly those relating to teaching and learning when you start to think about the differences between storing an package and then being able to run it. At a more fundamental level, and one that was brought up during the discussion, how should a repository deal with complex objects and their related standards/models – what should they injest, expose, make available to users? Answers on a postcard please :-)

The IEEE RAMLET (resource aggregration model for learning education and training) model is starting to address some of these issues by providing mappings in the form of an OWL ontology which will allow a system to perfom transforms from a number of specifications ( METS, MPEG21, IETF Atom have been idenfitied so far). But there’s no implementation yet, so how this will actually work remains to be seen.

Personally I found it really interesting to get an overview of each of the areas. Both MPEG 21 and the DC approach seemed to be quite similar in terms of each of them offering a great deal of flexibility in the ability to define and describe relationships between items. METS and IMS seemed to have a bit more strength in terms of describing structure. I think at this stage, it’s all still a bit horses for courses when deciding what standard to use/support, but I have no doubt that whatever the solution, metadata will play quite a big part in it.

Copies of the presentations from the day and a summary report comparing the appropriateness of the various approaches for digital repositories will be available from the RRT wiki soon.

Common cartridge – the future or five years too late?

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A large part of the recent IMS quarterly meeting in Heerlen was devoted to their new Common Cartridge specification. Heavily backed by publishers and vendors (including Pearson, McGraw Hill, Thompson, Angel, Sakai,Desire2Learn and Blackboard to name a few) this specification claims to “define a commonly supported content format, able to run on any compliant LMS platform.” which will “enable content providers to achieve lower production costs whilst expanding the effective market by eliminating platform dependency. This will both stimulate production by larger content providers and open up the market to their smaller counterparts. The LMS providers in turn, will have a stronger business case to take to their customers, as schools, colleges, universities, training departments and certification programs will have available a broader catalog of offerings reaching deeper into the curriculum.”

But wasn’t content packaging supposed to do that, weren’t we being promised this five years ago . . . Well yes, but as the CETIS codebashes showed, making packages interoperable wasn’t just as easy as implementing the specifcation, particularly when the specfication is able to be implemented in many different ways.

In essense the Common Cartridge specification is a profile of IMS Content Packaging which is begining to tie down many of the issues which imlementors and codebashes have highlighted. As well as IMS Content Packaging, this new specifcation also supports a number of other commonly used specifications including IMS Question & Test Interoperability v1.2, IMS Tools Interoperability Guidelines v1.0, IEEE Learning Object Metadata v1.0, SCORM v1.2 and SCORM 2004. Perhaps reflecting the more business (and dare I say pragmatic make up of the working group) support for newer versions of exsiting specifications such as QTI 2.0 is not being included in the initial release, as it was felt that there isn’t enough widespread adoption of these yet.

So, is this just another case of ‘old wine in a new bottle’ or can this specfication actually offer true interoperability? In the brave new world of webserivces are IMS Tools Interoperability guidelines relevant? Well, for me the jury is still out. If publishers and vendors back this and there are large numbers of cartridges available, then it will have an impact on certain parts of the education sector. But as for teachers/learning technologists creating/using/reusing them . . . I guess that will depend on the tools that are around to create the cartridges and aren’t we all just self generating content in wikis and blogs now anyway :-)

To help gain a clearer understanding of the potential impact of the Common Cartridge, Kevin Riley from IMS Global Org, is giving a presentation at the next Educational Content SIG meeting on 7th December at Glasgow Caledonian University. There will also be a presenation about the recently launched OU Open Content Initiative from Patrick McAndrew. Following in the footsteps of the MIT OpenCourseWare project, this UK based project is offering free online materials. It was hinted at the Heerlen meetings that Common Cartridge could be a potential format for this project. Watch this space for more details, or better still come along to the meeting and find out more.